So I went through an interesting series of transformations, first I was amazed about everything 'computer', I built my own Z80 machine, I ran through all of the languages that the mainframe the highschool had access too, I wrote games, "operating systems", computer languages, and various diversions just for fun. All the way through to about the mid-90's when I started working on the system that would become Java. The new stuff was fun, Sun's politics were soul crushing. I lost my sense of 'wonder' about doing cool things. It took me a while, wandering in the desert to realize that I was piling up all of these negative experiences against something I loved doing (systems design). I discovered it could be way fun to bring VMS up on an old VAX and show it off, to demonstrate active/active fail-over clustering on something as 'stupid' as a proprietary SCSI bus. The reason that was fun and 'regular' computers were not (to me at least) was that regular computers represented 'work' and 'the man' but these other computers were untainted. I committed myself to re-invigorating my 'wonder' and haven't looked back since.